MORE THREATS AGAINST CANADIAN BLOGGERS: I don’t understand why people on the right in Canada don’t just start filing lawsuits — and, better still, “human rights” complaints — right and left whenever anyone says anything bad about white people, Americans, etc. “Flood the zone!” Are Canadians just too nice to engage in such tactics? Not all of them, obviously.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Toronto reader Allan Marsh answers my question:

Because the Human Rights Commissions don’t accept complaints
from the right.

It’s as simple as that.

All complaints from conservatives in Canada automatically are rejected.

I don’t think even you have any idea how corrupt the “Human Rights” racket is in Canada.

Well, recent years have demonstrated that seemingly everything in Canada is more corrupt than I had thought, so that’s possible, I suppose. But that’s no reason not to file the complaints, and document the results.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, here’s one result:

The “Canadian” Human Rights Commission does not treat all Canadians equally. The lead investigator testifying on Tuesday, Dean Steacy, is blind, but the justice his commission administers certainly isn’t: if you’re one of their allies, they’ll start lurking on websites before you’ve made a formal complaint. But, if you’re not simpatico, they’ll reject your complaint on the grounds that it was on double-sided paper. Which was what happened to Mr. Lemire, when he tried to file his own Section 13 complaint against the police. Apparently, Mr. Lemire’s complaint was double-sided — which came as news to Mr. Lemire, since he faxed it in. But by the time it uncoiled itself at the other end it had become the first double-sided fax on the planet. “I don’t know what happened to the fax,” said Mr. Steacy non-committally. Hey, it’s a federal bureaucracy: things happen. Evidently one reason why Richard Warman has been the complainant on every Section 13 case since 2002 is that he’s the only one who remembers the critical single-sided rule.

Lemire is pretty creepy. But so is Warman. He’s just the right kind of creepy, I guess. Nonetheless, I think that forcing them to demonstrate just how one-sided and politically-driven their program is is worthwhile.

GOOD: Al-Qaeda Leader Al-Masri Dead in Afghanistan- Planned London Attacks. He’s been thought dead before, but I hope the real death, whichever it was, was at least somewhat uncomfortable.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Politicians are like parents who tell you what time to go to bed but can’t put dinner on the table.”

IN THE MAIL, from Ron Paul: The Revolution: A Manifesto.

“A PERVERSION.” Seems like a poor choice of words.

THOUGHTS ON alimony for men.

BLACK GOLD. TEXAS NORTH DAKOTA TEA. “A long-awaited federal report on oil that could be recovered in parts of North Dakota, Montana and two Canadian provinces is to be released this week. The Bakken shale formation encompasses some 25,000 square miles in North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. About two-thirds of the acreage is in western North Dakota, where the oil is trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles beneath the surface.” Whether this will live up to the 200 billion barrel figure that was bouncing around the blogosphere earlier isn’t clear. (Via Power and Control).

OBAMANOMICS: “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

FIREFLY coming to Blu-Ray?

I certainly hope so, but I guess it’ll be too late to make this big Blu-Ray sale at Amazon.

“BRO-MANCE?”

HMM: Hamas-Iraq accuses al-Qaeda in Iraq of ties to Iran, and gets specific.

Perhaps Jimmy Carter can bring this up with his Hamas folks when they meet.

AFRICAN-AMERICANS IN LOS ANGELES, opposing illegal immigration.

Woo-whee, the testimony was riveting this morning before the Los Angeles City Council when a group of black residents pleaded with the 15 elected council members to rescind Special Order 40, the longtime local rule protecting illegal immigrants from arrest by the LAPD.

The black residents are seeking a decision by the council to enact the so-called Jamiel’s Law, named after Jamiel Shaw, a promising and law-abiding 17-year-old high school student allegedly shot by an illegal immigrant, 18th Street Gang member Pedro Espinoza. The noxious Espinoza, who has a massively long rap sheet, was arrested and then released by the LAPD shortly before he allegedly murdered Jamiel.

Jamiel’s family members cried openly in the ornate Council Chambers, asking the council to allow cops to check on the illegal status of people like Espinoza so they can be deported rather than released.

This should create some interesting political tensions.

HOW NOT TO get the story.

MICKEY KAUS: “Is McCain’s first ad really as bad as blogger ‘Richelieu’ says? No. It’s worse! “

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “It is now respectable for Democrats to assert, even to welcome, military defeat (see here). But if a Presidential campaign functionary so much as hints at support for free trade, he’s banished to policy exile. That’s the meaning of Sunday’s sacking of strategist Mark Penn from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. . . . The grownups in both campaigns realize that free trade is good for the country, yet they must take a vow of public silence.”

OBAMA’S GUN DANCE:

Barack Obama, who informs campaign audiences that he taught constitutional law for 10 years, might be expected to weigh in on the historic Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are pondering whether the 1976 District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting personal gun ownership in the nation’s capital is constitutional. But Sen. Obama has not stated his position.

Obama, disagreeing with the D.C. government and gun control advocates, declares the Second Amendment’s “right of the people to keep and bear arms” applies to individuals, not just the “well-regulated militia” cited in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local “common sense” restrictions on firearms. Does the Draconian prohibition for Washington, D.C., fit that description? My attempts to get an answer have proved unavailing. The front-running Democratic presidential candidate is doing the gun dance.

And he’ll keep dancing as long as he can.

ROGER KIMBALL: Harvard amazes the world.

MONKS STORM MEDIA TOUR IN CHINA: “Fifteen Tibetan Buddhist monks interrupted a state-sponsored media tour of a restive region of western China on Wednesday, demanding the return of the Dalai Lama and yelling that they had no human rights.”

TONY BLAIR ON John McCain. Is this good or bad for McCain?

JERRY POURNELLE:

For an exceptional look at what happens to countries where the overall energy policies are dictated by imbeciles, lackwits, and lawyers (although I may be redundant in listing all three), look to South Africa, formerly an economic and industry powerhouse (pun intended) on the African continent. The country is now in a deepening economic crisis because they let all of the released inmates from the environmental asylum dictate policy, didn’t build new power plants or maintain the existing ones appropriately, and so now they can’t mine gold, platinum, and palladium at anything near normal production rates. A good part of the recent run ups on those metals’ prices is because of the reduced production. There are rotating power outages around the country for everyone, and SA industry is being reined in significantly, obviously reducing the quality of living for the ordinary person.

Okay, the lawyer remark hurts. But lawyers who think they know how to run energy policy probably qualify.

MUGABE THUGGERY IN ZIMBABWE: Being covered at This is Zimbabwe.

TOM MAGUIRE: “I am constantly reminded that I will never be smart enough to be a Democrat.”

MEGAN MCARDLE:

The fairly uncontroversial argument that some regulations might have mitigated our current problems has been transformed, in the minds of many commentators, into a belief that the meltdown must therefore have been the result of deregulation, or of rapacious financiers deliberately crippling the regulatory apparatus. Hence the frequent invocation of that magic name, Glass-Steagall, which of course can summon the spirit of FDR to fix the economy if only the president is brave enough to speak it three times aloud.

Heck, I can call the spirit of FDR from the vasty deep. . . .

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Tim Worstall.

TREATING SPINAL CORD INJURY with nanotechnology.